Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Adamson

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

Kate Bernheimer

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can't help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I'm very excited when I notice that.

Allen Tate

The Spring I seek is in a new face only.

Virginia Woolf

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Harold Bloom

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

Willie Nelson

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.

David Whyte

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.

Robert Pinsky

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

Guy Gavriel Kay

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

William Williams

Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination.

Ben Okri

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.

Sylvia Plath

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Mary Szybist

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

Kick back and sincerely enjoy this book. I hope some of these poems make you think.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

I wrote simple poems with deep meaning instead of confusing poems that no one understands.

Rachel Platten

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

Juan Felipe Herrera

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

Gilda Radner

I wanted a perfect ending. Now Ive learned, the hard way, that some poems dont rhyme, and some stories dont have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing whats going to happen next.

Sometimes you see kids addressing issues, whether it be suicide, or drugs affecting them or their family. Sometimes the poems are a cry for help - something they can't express but they need to say. It's feelings and emotions coming out. Not just a story to inform or educate, but true emotions. The other teens can really relate to that.

Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.

Christina Aguilera

People betrayed me and I had a really hard time. That, along with what I'd been through with my family and my father and hard times at school meant I was knocked down. It was too much and I felt I'd been through the wringer - I was like a punchbag. I think talking to people is important and my family have helped me through it. I'd definitely be open to going to a therapist. I went when I was younger. But making this record ('Stripped') has been therapeutic. It's a tough record, it's personal and it's made me feel vulnerable. It's honest. Emotionally I've laid myself bare - it's what's in my heart. I've been writing a lot of poems and I wanted to disappear from the public eye and live life for a minute. I didn't want to play it safe.”

Anna Garlin Spencer

No record... can... name the women of talent who were so submerged by child-bearing and its duties, and by general housework, that they had to leave their poems and stories all unwritten.

Thomas Bulfinch

The Welsh language is one of the oldest in Europe. It possesses poems the origin of which is referred with probability to the sixth century.

Edward Hirsch

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

June Diane Raphael

One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'

Andrew Motion

Actors may (or may not) read poems well, but poets have unique rights to their work, and unique insights and interests to offer as we hear their idiom, pacing, tone and emphases,

Catherine Helen Spence

Although my mother had the greatest love for Sir Walter Scott, and the highest appreciation of his poems and novels, she never liked Melrose.

Natasha Trethewey

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

Natasha Trethewey

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.

Natasha Trethewey

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.